@rrhoover Yeah! That's what I love about this. I'd never drop the $1500 to get gear like they have, or take the time to be as good as their pilots. But if I had a event or birthday, etc, it'd be so cool to have a drone & pilot show up to get awesome footage.

@rrhoover We're really trying to gear Animal Robo towards people who aren't drone dudes. As drones, (unmanned systems and moving robots in general) becoming something that everyone encounters all the time in daily, we want to build a service/interface that allows anyone to use drones without having to own or understand them fully!

Hey y'all, Kosuke Hata here, Founder and CEO of Animal Robo. Animal Robo is an iPhone app where you can set a time and place and you can get a drone on demand. We're currently available in the San Francisco Bay Area only.
Let me know if you have any questions!

I think the key point here is that this is not limited to drones (i.e. "unmanned systems and moving robots in general"). I'm certainly going to use Animal Robo for an event I'm organizing later this month. PH peeps are invited!

Neat idea
I think that the value prop could be described more clearly. The drone and drone pilot are kind of implementation details - what someone gets out of this service is an awesome video / set of photos of their place/event.

@kgdavis Thanks for the feedback, Kevin.
I agree -- the website needs more work, and we could be more clear about what we do. We want to do a better job of that as we tweak and make the site better.
I've been thinking about the value proposition a lot. It's true that generally what we're providing to the consumer is awesome video / set of photos. On one hand, I'm really excited about the future of unmanned systems / moving robots, and believe that it'll become a norm. I'm especially interested in the tasks that they can accomplish. So the thought was to keep it as open as possible at this stage -- and see what people want to do with it. Betting more on drones more than video.
Also we initially focused on providing the service end to end so that the user got a drone pilot + got the video edited. And if we offer video, it better be damn good and look spectacular. So we did some testing with real estate company for the past month or so. What we learned is that editing videos is a time consuming affair, and adds another layer of complexity to our operations of managing drone pilots. So instead, we jettisoned the editor portion of the app for now, and chose to focus on providing just the drones.
I spoke on the phone with @Quan today, and what he wants to do with drones isn't just video. So I do want to keep the platform open (for now) in terms of use cases. But I am definitely torn about selling the service as purely "You get a drone video" vs "You get a drone and you can do whatever you want with it.". I'm leaned towards the "You get a drone" side because I'm betting on unmanned systems overall, not videos. However, that doesn't mean the message can't be tweaked to consumers, so I want to figure out a good way to get that message across. Something to think about.